Yooz seeks more for users

Eddy Devisse is enthusiastic. But he’s also wary. Devisse is in a spacious and mostly empty room at Infotech Caribbean’s Port-of-Spain offices to discuss the company’s new mobile payment system, Yooz, and he’s got more to tell than he should.

Devisse, the general manager of Resonance Caribbean, has a lot to say about the new system, but he’s got so much more coming down the pipeline riding on the infrastructure that he actually stops himself mid-sentence more than once to say that he shouldn’t be talking about one feature or another yet.

In 2007, they became the first provider of mobile point-of-sale terminals to the banking industry.

It was the right product at the right time, and the company had its entry point into the ticklish relationship between the conservative banking sector and an even more skittish merchant community.

The company now claims a network of 2,500 merchants and 250,000 consumers that make use of their servers to manage purely electronic transactions.

Which brings us to Yooz, which began life as a straightforward way of using text-based short codes to top up your phone from a preset bank account.

Yooz uses Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) short codes, a feature of GSM phones which maintains a live, two-way connection between the company’s servers for the duration of the transaction.